Creekline Study 2

An antidote to the overly literal pieces I painted earlier in the week. This one is painted over that Beach Grass, Fenlyn Bay painting I did last week. (Killing two birds with one stone...)

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Shady Alley

Oh, well. Trying to give a bit of shape to the paint I was putting down. Too literal for my taste. Don't like painting in the mid-day sun. More comfortable at the margins of the day and a narrower range of colors.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Summer in Lansworth 3

I've got to come up with a new series; this one is way too hard to paint for some reason. I wanted this painting to be looking up a hill, an angle that is not my long suit, and I see that I failed to bring it off here. More like I'm painting from a step ladder on a level street...  The other thing you might notice is that I paint most of my pictures looking north: morning sun from my right, evening sun on my left... I try to keep it simple...


12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Sands and Grass, Long Sands Island

What's summer without a visit to Long Sands Island?  Besides, the struggle to produce a second 'Summer in Lansworth' painting frightened me from doing another one right away... This piece, by the way, is painted over the Summer in the Uplands painting that I posted a week or so ago that never quite clicked with me. The scene is only a means to an end, and the end for me is a feeling, a mood. Summer in the Uplands never achieved this end for me. This one I think does, though I spent a day and a half re-arranging clumps of grass and sand to get that mood.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on hardboard

Summer in Lansworth 2

Seeing how hard it was to get even this little painting done, I may have been wildly optimistic about a series of Lansworth paintings....

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Summer in Lansworth 1

The secret of success, I've read, is to be the best in the world at one thing rather than to be good, even great, at many things. Now, as an artist, should I try to expand my skill set and paint lots of things in lots of ways, or should I be the best damn impressionist artist to paint Lansworth in the world?  At the moment, I'm opting for the latter, which explains the "1" it the piece's title.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Summer in the Uplands (Revised again)

Well, at least I'm painting. Too bad I ain't painting all that good. Anyways, the lines were all wrong on the last version of this painting. Just didn't feel right. Today's lines are better, more laid back, but they still don't make much of a painting.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on hardboard

Summer in the Uplands (revised)

Altered the coloring of the foreground, making them bluer to narrow the tonal range a bit. What I really wanted to do was to reproduce the colors I ended up with in the recent piece called Creekline Study which I've come to like a lot. (The colors are softer in person than in the photo.) But with my by the seat of my pants way of painting, it's 'good luck with that', this is a close as it will get, I guess.


18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on hardboard

Summer in the Uplands

This is today's main painting. I painted this one in what I call 'daub style', that is to say rather than brushing the paint on, I more or less just daub it on with a stiff brush to give the trees a bit more texture and life. This style makes the sky less realistic, but realism is not even on my radar...

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on hardboard

Beach Grass, Fenlyn Bay (revised)

Usually I would not waste my time fiddling with a piece like this, it's either like it or paint over it. This piece however, was just too close to another painting I did a while back, so I wanted to make it a bit different, so I moved back the hills and added a hint of the sea.

still 12x16" 30c40cm acrylic on hardboard

Beach Grass, Fenlyn Bay

A shoreline would be more interesting to paint, (really, compared to this piece, what wouldn't be?) but I have certain issues with shorelines. Basically you have to paint them vertical and then try to give the impression that you're looking at something that is actually receding into the distance. This usually involves making objects smaller and smaller and perhaps fainter as the distance increases, something that is hard to do with my ham-fisted style. I usually try to avoid any middle distance in my paintings all the time: keeping everything on two planes: a foreground and a background. 

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Rainy Days

This morning I started painting with nothing in mind and this is what I ended up with. A standard scene of mine, but since I hadn't set out to paint anything, just putting paint on board, it's not surprising that I ended up with something similar to what I've done in the past. Not having a preconceived idea to achieve makes for a relaxing way to paint. Of course it's not very challenging either, but I'll challenge something tomorrow...

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Shady Street

I started painting this piece with a pallet knife but I found that I do too much of my painting on the board, things like mixing colors and deciding just what I'm painting, that working with a pallet knife was too cumbersome. And it's not very economical either, though it seems that if you're in the over the sofa art market, pallet knife paintings are all the rage. But since I'm not in that market, no point wasting paint...

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Morning in the Meadow with Sheep

Looks like this is the week's painting. Blame it on the nice weather. But I did go all out and put livestock in this painting, sheep (in long grass) being one of my specialties. Dogs, cats and seagulls are the other animals I dare to tackle.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on hardboard